Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Upcoming talk: Android App Development with Eclipse and the SDK

I went to the ENGRCS club meeting yesterday at Clark, and Izad asked if I could do a brief talk on Android development. I'm going to do that in 2 weeks, following the 24 Jan meeting. I'm planning to talk about the following:

creating a new project;

basic GUI layout/properties/etc.

where you write your code (onCreate()...);

how to find your objects (findViewById);

coding for events; and

compiling/debugging/executing.

I hope to go through some simple demos, including a basic Hello World app, some interactions with pushbuttons, and an example of reading sensors.

Things I may also get to include:

virtual devices (AVD) - so you can develop without an actual Android device;

adb (Android Debugging Bridge) - really useful and fun if you do have an Android device;

intents (e.g. receiving SMS messages);

application lifecycle;

string externalization; and

database interaction (e.g. reading your contacts).

If you're interested in working along during this discussion, you'll probably want to have pre-installed Eclipse, the Android ADT plugin, and the Android SDK. This can take a long time, and I'm not really planning to discuss the details of it; excellent instructions are available at http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html I followed the instructions blindly, with very little understanding of what I was doing, and it worked out fine :)

DISCLAIMER: I've got a lot of programming experience in general (more than I care to admit), but I am not an expert Android developer, nor am I the least bit proficient at using Eclipse. I've learned enough to develop some simple apps of my own, but I still take some things on faith; I'm still working somewhat at the cut-and-paste level for certain things; and I don't know anything about "best practices" and so on. But I have figured out enough to get started and to navigate the SDK documentation, and given enough time and good fast techno music, I can generally get things working, eventually. My goal is just to help others get to that point.